'Abdu'l-Bahá's station is carefully defined and Bahá'ís are precise about it because it was contested. He is not a Manifestation and receives no revelation; he is the Centre of the Covenant, the appointed sole interpreter of his father's writings, and the perfect exemplar of the teachings — the demonstration that a human being can live them. His life was shaped by imprisonment: exiled with his father from Tehran at eight, he was a prisoner of the Ottoman state in Akká and its environs until the Young Turk revolution of 1908 freed him at sixty-four. He then travelled through Egypt, Europe and North America between 1911 and 1913, speaking hundreds of times. During the First World War he organised agriculture around Haifa and stored grain, which prevented famine in northern Palestine; the British administration knighted him in 1920 as a KBE, and he accepted the honour but never used the title. He died in Haifa in 1921 and an estimated ten thousand people of every local community attended the funeral.